Video Gamers Podcast - Marvel Rivals, Zoochosis Insanity and More Judas Details - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

The Video Gamers Podcast is back with another incredible episode of This Week in Gaming. Can Marvel Rivals make up for the fall of Overwatch? Zoochosis gives us an absolutely bananas video game trailer and we get a more in-depth look at one of the most anticipated video games around as more details and gameplay emerge for Judas, the successor to Bioshock. Plus more in this awesome gaming packed episode! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: YayaArizona, Disratory and Cykasniber Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at Samsung.com. Hello fellow gamers! We are the Video Gamers Podcast, hosted by three dads who might just

love gaming a little bit too much. Today, we are here like we are on every Thursday, giving our thoughts on some of the biggest gaming news stories over the last week. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, he is building Legos? No, not those kind that you might be thinking about. It's Josh. Plot Legos. Remember those plot Legos? I'm selling a brand new set. Don't lose any. Don't lose the instructions.

Whatever you do, just don't skip a step. Especially with what Josh would put together. Oh, man. All right. And then joining Josh and me, he is filing a lawsuit against several developers for making games that are just too good. It's Ryan. This is way too much fun.

I can't stop myself. It's everybody else's fault. At least we don't have to worry about it. They owe you money. Look on the bright side, guys. We don't have to worry about Forspoken or Battlefield 2042 getting sued. That's very true. That's true.

Yes. We've had a few stinkers over the last couple of years. All right, guys, let's jump right into it. We got a lot to talk about today. We're going to try to hit five topics here. First of all, we got to talk about Judas. Yes, we do. Now, this is the game from Ken Levine

that we have talked about a couple of times. It's been called Bioshock in Space. It's a first-person narrative-driven shooter. You've got a gun in your right hand. You got magical abilities out of your left. It looks and plays very familiar to any Bioshock fans. We last talked about Judas in February when there was a story trailer, but we hadn't really seen very much of gameplay in the game. Well, a couple of days back, Ken Levine gave an interview that was a whole hour and 17 minutes that I don't know about you guys. I sat through the whole thing, but he did this interview with IGN and the Game Awards. And I was very curious to hear your guys' thoughts because

I think we would all say this was at the top of the hype list. We were just wanting more information. And I feel like we got a ton in this interview. Like, what are some of the hype list we were just wanting more information and i feel like we got a ton in this interview like what are some of the things that stood out to you guys oh man uh bioshock in space you can't go wrong that's a recipe no absolutely i am i almost we were looking uh just the other day my son and i were looking for something to play and bioshock was on the switch and i'm like oh man do i want to get sucked back into that world? Because I know I would. I know me.

But this was already pretty high. I was excited, and I just wanted to see more. It's shooting up the list very, very quickly for me. I love everything he said. I watched most of that interview, Paul. I didn't watch the whole thing like you did. It was long. No two playthroughs will ever be the same.

You can use the environment. You can hack your enemies. You can battle them against each other. There's just so much that I am so excited for. I love the art style. I love the way it looks. Just like I love Bioshock. I'm just beyond excited for this.

Everything that I heard and saw, I loved. Man, I'm ready. Yeah. The more we're seeing of this, the more it is just shooting up my anticipation meter. I mean, it's Ken Levine. Let's be honest. The whole Bioshock series is super good. I know just like any trilogy, there's, you know, everybody's like, oh, Bioshock 2 wasn't that great. Whatever. They were all fine. Like, when we start seeing the way that he's approaching it, and it's funny because it kind of trolled him. They're like, dude, this has been in development for 10 years now. Like, 10 years. How are you not fired?

Yeah, like, you know. Is basically what they said. What's going on? And then he kind of starts breaking down what's taken them so long. And Paul, you kind of alluded to the plot Legos system. So he refers to those a lot, where it's like you have these Legos and they're the building blocks for whatever you want to make. And he took a long time to explain that basically in Judas, these Legos will... You're crafting the story in how you behave in the game. And the best example that he gave of that is you were dealing with three main...

I'll call them antagonists at this point, right? So it's like, these are... Frenemies might be better. Yeah, frenemies is a good... Right. And so it's like you're choosing a faction that you want to work with. And each faction is represented by a hologram of a person that is very present. Apparently, all three of them are very present in the game. But mission to try to help the one person. And one of the other people that doesn't like you anymore will start pointing out your position and calling you out to the people that you're trying to sneak past and things like that. So this system... I mean, we were just kind of talking about AI in video games. And while I don't think this is AI, I think they took the time to actually program a lot of the building blocks into Judas. I think that's going to be like a taste, where it's like the game is going to react to how you play it. The characters are going to

react to the decisions you make. And like you said, this makes for very unique playthroughs almost every time from what we're hearing. Yeah. He was talking about how Bioshock is a little bit more action forward, and he was really comparing it to action movies. And he was saying that Judas, I think, is going to maybe just scale back a tiny bit on the action, and there's a little bit more of a focus on making decisions, which is there to an extent in Bioshock, but only so much. And I love the idea of the concept of these narrative Legos as a metaphor. He was basically saying, we can handcraft lines of dialogue and certain events that can happen in the game, but we can do it in a way that's

vague enough that they'll only kick in under certain conditions based on your choices. So, for example, he was kind of saying, you can have a whole bunch of Lego pieces, but now how can those fit together to build and make something else? And so, as you're playing through the game, and you decide to go down this corridor instead of that one, then maybe it'll trigger one of those three characters popping up and talking to you and giving you a different mission or sabotaging you or doing something entirely different. And he said that he loves

the idea of the water cooler moment where you assume your playthrough is the same as your buddy, but then all of a sudden you realize that your playthroughs were wildly different because you made different decisions. So we could even experience like the same lines of dialogue, but under completely different contexts within the game. It really sounds like very ingenious gaming and everything I heard from him is great. I just wish that we could see like a solid 10 minute chunk of gameplay because that's still missing. And he even referenced that, like he said, I know know as gamers you don't really have to talk about it a lot you just want to see it and of course the irony is that he talks about

it for 90 minutes and we don't see a ton but we did get some chunks there like ryan do you want to talk a little bit about how that hacking worked oh yeah it was because you were mentioning that yeah all the stuff with the environment and the hacking you know you have a lot of the stuff with the environment and the hacking, you know, you have a lot of the stuff on this ship that you're on is, is automated in it. And it's like, it's like a legacy. It's generational traveling to this new planet. So they have all of these,

uh, robots around to help and you can hack into them. So you have like a cleaning bot or, or these other types and you can make them, you know, either help you or you can hack them and then kill them. So there just seems like a lot of cool features that they put. They took the time to really, like you said,

make it to where every playthrough is different. Maybe you really like hacking, or maybe you like using the environment. My mind is just so all over the place with this because I'm so excited, but there's so many different ways you can play through and use those systems. And the hacking one is just, that looks so cool to me. Yeah. This is like another layer on top of the Bioshock.

And I mean, Ken Levine even kept referencing, he's like, I know this looks like Bioshock because we have these ideas that are foundational ideas. And so we build off of those, but he was very clear to say like, Judas is going to play a lot differently. It might look like Bioshock, but it's going to play a lot different in the end, you know,

when everybody's done with it, but we did get some more footage. I think it was a total like six minutes of actual extra footage that we haven't seen before. A lot of that was just combat and kind of around the station and the three main characters that you interact with. I mean, the gameplay looks like Bioshock. I mean, it looks like a spiffed up Bioshock for sure. But you've got your fire, you've got your ice, you've got your electrical. The hacking, I think, is that additional layer where you can hack

something and it pulls up almost like a wheel where you can then say, I want you to go into aggressive mode or, hey, you're a robot, so why don't you eject oil on the ground? And then the robot ejects oil and then you can light the oil on fire and then it burns all the other robots that are standing around it and stuff like that. So Bioshock games have always been known for giving you a choice in how you want to approach combat. And this looks to follow that almost to the T, which I am a huge fan of. Let me be creative. Let me figure out ways to kill things in glorious fashion. And I'm okay with that. So I think the more I see this game, the better and better it looks. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I love the fact that you're going to have choice,

not just in regards to how you face combat, but story-wise also. I really liked that he said he wants you to take control of your environment. So instead of just shooting stuff or directly hitting it with fire or lightning or ice it's more like how can i use the environment in creative ways to engage in combat unfortunately there's still no release window this is one of those games where it's like i'll believe it when i see it because it's been in development for over a decade uh but i think we're all very hyped about this one i mean i would say for me it's kind of like gta6 dragon age 4 even though i'm very hyped about this one. I mean, I would say for me, it's kind of like GTA six dragon age four, even though I'm very nervous about that entry and Judas might be like my top

three that I'm waiting for. It's looking really, really good. And hearing him talk about how they approached it gives you a lot or gives me a lot of confidence anyway, that they're not going to screw this up and that the development time is well spent. Yeah. And he just seemed so excited to talk about it. It was a lot of fun.

All right. Well, before hitting up our next story, we would like our listeners to come check out Patreon support options, especially if you've been enjoying our show for a while. We do rely on listener support to get by. We've all got day jobs. We do try to work really hard to put out good content, help you all get distracted from the stresses of life and work and whatnot. If you have a couple bucks to spare, you can come sign up for a couple months, and it's not for nothing. You'll get a shout out on the show. You get bonus episodes twice a month. You can come take a look at MultiplayerSquad.com. All right, next story here. As Overwatch 2 and Blizzard have really disenchanted the gaming community, we have a new hero shooter on the horizon, courtesy of Marvel Rivals. This is an upcoming

6v6 PvP game. It's got destructible environments. We know it's going to have a minimum of 18 characters from Marvel that you can choose from it's got characters like iron man spider-man hulk loki black panther magneto and others uh unlike overwatch it'll be third person instead of first which is kind of an interesting choice do you guys see this game potentially being a quote overwatch killer now overwatch is the overwatch killer exactly they killed themselves it's a suicide just they just committed whatever the opposite of seppuku is, because it's not honorable. So dishonorable. I'm a sucker for hero shooters, man.

I mean, there's a reason that we love to Overwatch so much. I like the variety of being able to play a bunch of different characters, because as long as the core gameplay is fun, having 18 different characters that I can play and learn and have different roles really adds to the longevity of a game for me in that regard. Because it's like, if I get bored playing support, let me go play tank or let me play DPS or, oh, this DPS is way more fun than that DPS. So my brain instantly looks at this game in this trailer, and I went, ooh. Like, I get to be Hulk?

I get to be Iron Man? I get to be, I'm sure Wolverine's going to be in it, which I'm telling you right now, I'm going to main Wolverine. You know? So oddly, what I have seen looks pretty good. I don't know how I feel about saying that, man. I hear a little bit of hesitation. What's the hesitation?

I mean, it's NetEase that is publishing this game. Do you know what else they've made? I mean, I know, but I'm sure it's every microtransaction known to man. Diablo Immablo immortal they developed that's netty's just 9.99 yeah that's gonna be it exactly but you know what if the gameplay is fun and it it works then it's gonna work man and i'm a sucker for these types of games so i'll i'll be checking it out when when i watch the trailer i thought to myself i was like man this is gonna hype josh up he's gonna like this and i'm so like disenfranchised with marvel

right now but you know what i don't have is a marvel 6v6 hero shooter to play i just i think i'm like you mentioned it the way overwatch kind of turned the tide on that whole situation with Blizzard and everything. I just have a bad taste in my mouth for it. I'm sure there were parts of it that I thought looked really neat. I do love. I love hero shooters. I had fun. And if I'd be playing with you guys or other people that are friends and stuff, I'm sure I would have a blast.

I mean, seeing where Dr. Strange is floating and he opens up that little kind of portal through Spider-Man jumps through like that was cool. Like, so I think there'll be cool features of it if they, if they can do it right. And maybe be like, Oh,

look what happened to overwatch and how they developed it. Let's kind of pattern it towards overwatch one, make it Marvel, make it fun and enjoyable and not microtransaction the crap out of it, maybe we can have something. So, I don't know. I'm very cautiously optimistic. They're going to microtransaction the crap out of it. That's a given.

It's free to play. Yeah, but I will say, if they can copy the pacing of Overwatch's combat and the fluidity, this game's going to work, man. Like, honestly. We've always man like honestly if it's a free like we've always said that if it's a free to play game we don't care about micro transactions provided they're not pay to win right like that's the one thing is if you're telling me that I can

get Hulk for $20 but Hulk is just super OP and smashing everybody we have a problem with the balance of your game and it being pay to win at that point. But if you're letting me play this game for free and you want to unlock a few new characters or some cosmetics or whatever microtransactions they come up with, that makes sense because you're giving me the game for free at that point. So in that case, I don't have a problem with it because I don't have to give you money if I don't want to. So yeah, I think if they nail the pacing and they can get the combat down,

I think this game's going to be a lot of fun to play. I do love that it's 6v6, you know, shout out to Overwatch 1. I will say my biggest worry about it is that it didn't seem like a whole lot of team play together. It was a lot of people just kind of off on their own fighting. Like Ryan mentioned, one of the only few times that you see any kind of cooperation, whether it's Dr. Strange opening a portal that a teammate can use,

or you see rocket jump on top of Groot and they do some kind of like combo move. But outside of that, that's where I'm a little worried. Cause you don't have like a reinhardt shield to hide behind or you know support it does it seems like there's no support at all it just kind of seems like everyone's dps so i don't know we'll have to see i there's no doubt we'll end up playing it because it's free we'll check it out for sure imagine like spider-man you do like a combo where

he grabs wolverine and then swings him and launches them towards with his claws. They put a combo system in this game. I am in a hundred percent, dude. I am in for like every possible two player combo. That would be so amazing, dude. It'd be pretty sweet. All right, well, let's go ahead and take a short break and then we will be right back. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others.

BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes visit betterhelp.com today to get 10 off your first month that's betterhelp.com all right guys time for by far my favorite news story of the week boy oh boy buckle up for this one zookosis uh possible game of the year candidate dude yes i know maybe no no no okay i've got a femur of the year oh man the only prescription is some zookosis all right this this is a quote body cam horror simulation game, which doesn't really seem to fit the trailer, but that's what they're calling it. It is coming out this quarter. They

say quarter two of 2024. I don't even know where to start with this one, guys. You're playing as a nighttime zookeeper, but then there's like weird viruses or mutations going on with some of these animals. It starts out weirdly enough with like really pleasant music, which I thought was funny. You have like a little Pip-Boy looking device and it tells you like what you have to do. And it's like, prepare the meat, feed the gorillas, prepare the vaccines and it's just stuff like that but then all of a sudden everything just turns really like weird and gross like what's some of the stuff going on in this trailer here oh well i mean you're vacuuming up poop number one sure yeah the projectile pooping from the gorillas weirdest trailer i've ever seen man and when that happened and then i

thought that guy had a flamethrower like in case the gorillas started going all ape on him you know like i because it kind of looks like a flamethrower and then vacuum i'm watching this trailer and this gorilla just starts projectile pooping and then i'm like burn it burn it you know and then and then the guy turns the thing on and it's a vacuum. And then he takes it later on, like, like, I don't know,

a minute later in the trailer. And you see him like putting the poop in a machine and it's compacting the poop for some bugs or something. Or I didn't. Then there's the giraffe spider thing with 18 limbs coming out of it and crawling on the ceiling. I'm like, what is this game man that was wild and and i just want to say i do not think that a poop vacuum would be very efficient no imagine trying to clean that oh god dude this has got weird stuff so like right off

the bat you're preparing meat but then it's clearly a human wrapped up in a bag that drops into a grinder and the next thing you know the guy's like playing a mini game where he's cutting out like five kilograms of meat or something and it tells you you have to be within five percent so now you're like going soylent green but doing these cooking mini games and then all of a sudden it turns into like action at the end where he's you've got like the montage of him getting the tranquilizer darts ready and he's like going to go hunt down the animals now. I don't know what's going on.

This felt like a fever dream the entire time I was watching it. Yeah, I actually I watched this trailer twice because I thought surely i didn't just see what i just saw on this you know and it's funny because like i i tuned out within the first like five minutes uh where it was just or not actually i don't even know how long the trailer is it wasn't the first five minutes but i like because i'm like this is just a sim game like i thought this was going to be something completely different and it's just a guy making up food for the animals and then carrying it to the animal cages and like feeding it to the animals and then cleaning up their poop and i'm like dude i don't want a zoo sim game but then it got weird like really weird super weird and then i'm kind of like well wait a minute

what is this is this a sim game? Is it a horror? Like, I don't know. I really don't know. I'm very baffled right now. You did see what you saw. And my name's not Shirley. Yeah, I was thinking the same. I know.

That's right where my brain went to. No, yeah, it was. I actually, ironically, I watched it twice as well. And I'm glad I did because the first time I really kind of wasn't paying attention and i was like oh that seems pretty cool i was like oh some of those features were neat and then i re-watched it and i saw all of those other weird little parts of it and i was like okay this is kind of this is way off the wall this is weird and just kind of parts were just gross you know like the poop super gross yeah i'm just you know i don't know i i hope this is a free-to-play too they can put all the micro transactions they want

yeah i would like this is not a game that i think i will play to be honest oh none of us will but i would like somebody out there to play it and then report back to us just explain what this is man give us a write-up send it in yeah that that's that's like actually one where if someone went legendary and picked it we might just say like you got to pick something else i felt like i ended up on some kind of government watch list just by watching this trailer it's totally bananas but hey credit to them for going with a wild idea i'll i'll at least give them that all right let's oh remember when i said just a couple weeks ago that we got one of the more bananas trailers we had

ever seen with nobody wants to die yeah oh yeah yep goodness gracious yeah i said that too early this one blew that way out of the way out of the water all right moving along this next one will be pretty quick here last week we did talk a a little bit about Flintlock as we got some more glimpses of the combat. This is the one that got a lot of attention early on, calling it Elden Ring meets God of War. And we all kind of said, we see more of the God of War DNA, not so much Elden Ring. Well, they did end up releasing a nine-minute gameplay trailer that showed a lot more of Flintintlock we got to see a lot more about the mechanics of the game it's also narrated by two of the directors is there anything that you saw in here that is worth telling our listeners um flintlock more like flint rock Because I'm kind of digging the combat on this one.

I am too. Yeah. I mean, they really went into it. They were talking about your powder weapons, like your flintlock pistol. You get grenades and things like that. They were talking about the axes that you can use and some of the actual melee weapons. They started talking about this cool combo system that I thought was really neat because it's very risk-reward. The more variety of moves and different flair that you do in combat, you build up these combo points.

And then you can choose to bank those and put them away, or you can let it ride. But if you take damage, then you lose all your combo points. And your combo points are actually the currency in the game because they're saying, look, renown is everything for a warrior and your renown is what matters. And so they just started saying all this stuff. And I'm kind of like, realized I was nodding my head. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Oh, oh, I can, I can risk it all and let it ride or I can bank it away. And then it resets the combo meter. I, there is a lot to the combat in this game. The other thing I saw that I thought was really cool was the stripping away of armor on enemies where you have to like, basically for simplicity's sake, we'll just call it like a

stun bar where if you charge up this stun bar on an enemy and it's an armored enemy, she like grabs the shield with her ax and then flings it away or like hits them so hard that their helmet flies off. And now they're like, they're unarmored and i was just like this is a really neat progression like in a combat system so i really liked what i saw from this yeah you you i mean you you pretty much covered it i was the same way i was just sitting there nodding my head okay yes yes yes no yes yeah you know going on with it it was um just combat, combat, combat. It looked so good. I love, I'm notoriously not a big fan of the Souls game, but I love Souls Lite. I think that's a great mix to where they have that.

It's obviously a proven system that works, and a lot of people like that gameplay and that style of combat. I mean, not so much, but the Lite part of it, to where you still have those other abilities. And then I am an archery hunter, but I light part of it to where you still have those other abilities. And then I am, I'm an archery hunter, but I also hunt, uh,

elk with a muzzle loader. I love the flintlock system. I love having to reload. So you have to time your shots. You're not just running around willy nilly with the machine gun and just blowing everything up. You have to be selective on how you do go at these enemies. So,

um, just, I love the world. I love the way it looks. I love the combat. I'm this is, I know I said it for Judas, but this one's shooting up the list for me too. And they mentioned that to recharge your flintlock stuff, you have to do melee combat to recharge that, which I thought was really cool on top of everything else. So when you take a whole bunch of little systems in a game that is focused on combat, to me,

that's what adds that flavor and makes the combat fun enough to carry you through an entire game, right? Like, I don't know what the plot of this game is. And honestly, if the combat's that good, the plot doesn't have to be because it's going to suck me in and I'm going to have a lot of fun just playing the gameplay portion of it. I mean, if they can get a good story on top of that, fine. But all of these little systems and these combos and one skill feeds off of another skill and you have range, but it's super powerful. So you have to be wary of when you use it and

the traversal aspects, your little weird pet fox thing. All this stuff is coming together from what I have seen to say, hey, this game, this game should be on your radar. You should at least be taking a look at it and seeing what it's about. 2024, man. Who would have thought? I know we did not see it coming at all. One last thing about flintlock is we have talked about how much we love active reloading mechanics on guns. You got that in here as well. So not only that, it actually looks relatively difficult. Like that meter feels very quickly and you got to do a little quick time of it to reload your gun and be able to get off that next shot quicker. And I love, I love when,

like you said, Josh, all those systems work together to keep it not from being just a button masher. That's what really stuck out, stuck out to me is they're really encouraging all these combos. These abilities lead into one another. So you're not just hitting X, X, X, X, Y, X, X. So I think it's shaping up to look really interesting. All right, moving on to our final story of the week. There are currently six video game addiction lawsuits that have been filed against various developers and publishers. This includes some companies like Microsoft, Activision Blizzard, Roblox, Rockstar, and others. For example, in one case, a mom in Arkansas says that her son was hooked at 12 years old to video

games and now at 21 suffers from depression and anxiety and experiences withdrawal symptoms like rage, anger, and physical outbursts when he stops playing. And they say that developers are intentionally making games addictive, which is hurting people. My reaction to this was like, yeah, of course they do. This is in every industry under capitalism. Restaurants do studies on what temperature the air should be. What kind of music should you play to get people to stick around and order dessert? Casinos have the oxygen levels.

They intentionally make them like mazes to not find the exit to gamble more. No, I mean, this is kind of this is just business. I mean, are developers truly to blame here? Or should we be blaming the parents of minors and the adults for not being able to handle their own behavior? Ryan, you want to rant first or you want me to rant first? I want you to rant first. I got to calm myself down because I have a lot that I can't say on this podcast.

Oh my goodness, man. Listen, okay. I know we're all gamers and maybe we're a little biased, but when you start giving, I read this story and I was like, okay, I thought they were going to talk about like loot boxes and how that's gambling for kids. And my daughter's loves Pokemon cards, man. She has blown so much money on Pokemon cards and she never gets good polls. And I'm just telling, I tell her every time I'm like, this is gambling for children. You know what I mean? Let this be a lesson. And she's just like, no tell her every time, I'm like, this is gambling for children. You know what I mean? Let this be a lesson. And she's just like, no, I love Pokemon. I'm like,

okay, whatever. But like, okay, so loot box and all that stuff aside, they're talking about the foundation of video games. To give you an idea, they reference Call of Duty, one of the largest, most popular video game franchises out there i mean even people that don't game know what call of duty is right and it says in this lawsuit the call of duty is criticized for rewarding players with gun and attachment unlocks which the lawsuit calls a form of operant conditioning as well as featuring fast-paced play satisfying graphics sounds, sounds, and other dopamine lifts. Should they make games worse?

Is that what they're arguing? Is this like, are you saying that we all have to play bad video? Because we play a lot of bad video games for this podcast, and it's not fun. If all we had to do was play bad video games, we would not do this podcast for very long. I want to file lawsuits against Forspoken and Battlefield 2042 for being so bad. Like, if anything, I want to go the other way.

Yes, you ruined my dopamine. Yes, I want that time of my life back, man. This is just, dude, I wish that we had a penalty system in our justice system to say, listen, if you raise a bogus lawsuit, you're the one that has to pay the fines. Like legitimately, you know what I mean? This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, man. This mom with her 12 year old son, wait a minute. So you're telling me you let your 12 year old kid get addicted to video games? Yeah, that's on the mom. And then you're blaming the games

for your kid being a turd? That's on the parent, man! I would almost guarantee that that video game was a babysitter. Oh, absolutely. 100%. Obviously, we play a heck of a lot of video games. I have a son. He's

seven years old. He loves video games. He calls his video game bros. But if I don't stop him, of course he's seven years old he loves video games he calls his video game bros but even if i don't stop him of course he's gonna want to just keep playing just like he would if he was eating candy or anything else it's our job as parents or guides to these little humans to show them what they should do hey dude let's uh let's park it for a bit let's go outside and get some sunlight you know we need to to see the sun you know i'm sure this kid probably saw the sun three times you know in his whole childhood uh and now he's got a lot of issues go figure so i don't know there's just i everyone is so sue happy and you want to just lawsuit over everything it's it's crazy i just uh josh pretty much covered a lot

of it but you just you can, I don't even know. I'm kind of at a loss for words. Self accountability, man. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You're a bad parent.

Like, I'm sorry, lady. I don't know who you are, but you're a bad parent. If you're, if your kid is like this. Yeah.

But instead of saying like, maybe I shouldn't have let my kid play video games for 12 hours a day when he was 12 years old. Instead, you go, oh, I can't take the blame. Not me. It must be somebody else's problem. And then you start pointing the finger at the video game industry. This is a losing battle, number one. I mean, how long have they been trying to prove that video games cause violence in people? Oh, they've proven it doesn't. Yeah, exactly. But you still hear the whispers and the murmurs from the, you know, the old guard of people that maybe still think that way, you know? And now it's,

now you have this where it's like, oh, video games are addicting. No, they're fun. We have fun in life, man. Like that's like saying that TV is addicting or food is addicting or any of these number of things, like you gotta, you gotta look at the person, not what the person is doing in that regard, you know? And it's a stuff like this aggravates the crap out of me. Well, and, and patterns don't just happen overnight. Like you hand a 12 year old a video game and if they're having that kind of reaction where they're not going to put it down, that's when you tell them to put it down, right?

I mean, with our kids, we always had limits on screen time. That's what we always said. Like, I don't care if it's a tablet or internet or TV or video games. You get two hours a day. And in the summer, we bump it up to three or four. And some people might even say that's way too much. I mean, I would get it if people do. But that's the thing.

Like, as parents, you're responsible for setting limits. If you let your kids go hog wild, starting at 12 years old, yeah, they're going to develop unhealthy habits, but that's not the video game's fault. I mean, it's their job to sell games and it's your job to decide whether or not to buy it for your kid. And it's up to you how much they play it. I mean, ultimately this is just a giant parenting breakdown. Blaming them being fun was the biggest, like, oh my goodness, this can't be a serious moment for me. That's why I kept expecting it to be like,

you know, the loot boxes or the battle passes, and then they were just like, these games are too fun. They're fast-paced. They have good music. They're enjoying them just way too much yeah it's it's a hundred percent just just babysitter and then the kid never was learned anything else and now can't socialize or interact with the world they just all they know is but what they need to do bring back uh like cyber bullies and internet like trolls and stuff on there and then that'll oh no that'll harden them up real quick i don't know if that's the answer but i i get the spirit

of what you're saying video gamers podcast does not support cyber bullying by the way just in game just in game that's all just in game okay yeah yeah this is like your parenting book is like hire online bullies to get your kids to change i like it it's a bold strategy both tragic cotton all right well that wraps up everything here for this week in gaming as a reminder swing by our patreon page at multiplayer squad.com for some sweet bonus episodes and have the satisfaction to keep our show running you can rate our show five stars. You can follow us on socials at Video Gamers Pod and come join the free Discord server. There's a link in the episode description. Thank you so much to everyone out there for listening. Until next

time, happy gaming. Don't be a bully. Yeah. And don't have fun with your video games either, or somebody will try to sue you see ya see everybody